Barbara LaMorticella

Freedom is exactly the point! Under a single payer health plan you would be free to choose your own doctor (which you aren’t now under most insurance plans), free to quit a job and open a business or go to school without worrying about losing your medical care, free to have the treatment or surgery you need without worrying about bankruptcy or homelessness. You would be free from the anxiety of worrying whether that cough or nagging pain is cancer, because you would be able to get the proper diagnostic tests when you need it. Doctors would be free to prescribe treatments they feel patients need, instead of only the ones the insurance companies authorize.

The fact is that the “free market”, as the famed Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz pointed out, has proven to be an unworkable model in medical care. Stiglitz said he had concluded that a singe payer heatlh care system is necessary. To make a “free market” ideology central to medical practice is an open invitation to replace the Hippocratic oath with the classic stick-up line: “Your money or your life!” Which is where we’re at in medical care in the US today.

By the way, except for the highest paid medical specialists, when decreased overhead, insurance and legal fees are taken into account, doctors in Canada earn roughly the same as doctors in the US. And they are much more satisfied with their practice of medicine.

There are more than 50,000 chemicals in our air, water and food, only a tiny percentage of which have been tested for safety. Cancers do not come with tags that say: “I came because you lived next to a gas station as a child”, or “I came from the BPA in the canned soup you ate every day,” or “I came from the pesticides on the fruit you love, or the dry cleaning chemicals you inhaled on your job....” No one can say what infant may have been damaged for life by being bathed daily in hexachlorophene soap recommended by their doctor, or whether a heart attack may have come from Vioxx or from a daily pint of ice cream, or whose poor health may be a result of the styrene and benzene in the styrofoam cups they drink from, or the contaminated honey from Asia they put on their cereal every day. The list is endless.

In an industrial society, one faulty decision on the part of a corporation or a government body can hurt hundreds of thousands of people. Therefore, along with the wealth that comes from industrialization, any industrial society must also accept the responsibility to provide health care for its citizens, if it has any right to be called civilized at all.

Human rights are not a luxury concocted by the left, but a uniquely (at that time) American concept, important enough to be embedded by our founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence, which specifies that every individual has the right to life. It’s past time that we make this right real and provide health security for all our people with a single payer health plan.

On the one hand, Common Sense, you hold capitalism up as the pinnacle of human achievement on this planet, on the other hand you resist facing the fact that capitalism is based on consumption, and advertising is the necessary tool to keep the cycle going, and advertising works because most people are susceptible to it.

Sorry, I posted this twice as I originally (accidentally) posted it as a stand-alone item, instead of a reply to yours.

On the one hand, Common Sense, you seem to hold capitalism up as the pinnacle of human achievement on this planet, on the other hand you resist facing the fact that capitalism is based on consumption, and advertising is the necessary tool to keep the cycle going, and advertising works because most people are susceptible to it.

“The reason health care is expensive is because we demand more than ever before.” Are you saying we make more doctors visits than ever before? Not so. And I think you are confusing service with hardware and pharmaceuticals. The “need” for more pharmaceuticals is promoted both by advertising and by the way doctors are trained in medical school.

Services are offered by people, practitioners in the case of medical services. Human services are NOT a non-renewable resource. Many, many people with the ability to do so would be happy and proud to be able to perform a healthcare-related service, whether as a M.D or a speech or occupational therapist, an acupuncturist, a nutritionist or a masseuse, if they were able to afford training and if patients could afford their services.

I do not believe your explanations for America’s poor longevity are unsubstantiated by fact.

It simply isn’t true that when people need serious health care, they come here. More and more Americans, in fact, are going to other places-- some insurance companies will even pay for people to obtain health care overseas, as it’s cheaper.

You seem to be confusing national health care with a socialist political system. They are not the same thing.

Technicalities? A “little temporary safety” is the same as “security”???

If you live in a world where you cannot afford a diagnostic scan until your tumor has grown so big that it’s inoperable, doesn’t it make sense that you don’t have any life any more?

We live in a world in which there are some 84,000 chemicals in use in consumer products, only about 250 of which have been tested. ( See http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/316).

We live in a world where one bad decision in a corporate boardroom or by a government agency can adversely affect the health of tens of thousands of people. Any industrial country that calls itself civilized must accept, along with the riches that come with industrialization, the responsibility to provide health care for its people. Doesn’t that make sense?

Health care is not a commodity. It is fundamentally a service, a relationship based on the practitioners knowledge and skill and the patient’s trust. It is not an industry that manufactures widgets.

The US pumps an incredible 23% of the federal budget into health care, a bigger percentage than many countries who provide lifelong health care for everyone. Those countries have better results in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality than the US, and in those countries no one ever going bankrupt or loses their home to pay for health care. How can this be? Because in the U.S. instead of instituting a single payer system, a system that works in every other country in the industrialized world, successive generations of U.S. politicians have forged compromises to keep insurance companies in the game. Each time this has happened, the insurance companies and the big players in the medical industry have become richer and more powerful, until we have arrived at the present inhumane, inefficient, and monstrously expensive mess US health care is today. Where they big industry players once served as advisors to legislators, they now quite freely sit down at the table and write legislation, as is the case with Obama care. But to remove government money from health care now would simply leave the corporate robbers the government has been working for in charge of our health care system.

A single payer system, a public insurance fund financed equitably by taxes paid into by everyone and available to everyone, would give the American public enormous bargaining power. Manufacturers of drugs and hardware would have to compete, as they would want this market. Well-designed, a single payer system would allow patients free choice of medical practitioners. Well-designed, a single payer system would allow doctors to practice the medicine they want, not the medicine the HMOs or insurance examiners mandate.

We can do better, much better, than the present health care system in America, whose slogan is the classic robber’s stick-up line: “Your money or your life.”

It's late and my comment above got somewhat scrambled. In fact, today's postal service is supposedly operated like a business, but is NOT required (though it is permitted) to make a profit-- it simply has to break even. But in practice it has made a billion dollars a year PROFIT for the past five years... while service and working conditions get worse.

It's a myth that Canadians flock across the border to get care! A very small number of Canadians come here, people who want and can afford non-essential elective procedures. And only a small percentage of them come here specifically for care-- mostly the ones who get care here are "snow birds"-- wealthy Canadians who come Florida to escape harsh winters, and stay to have a tummy tuck or plastic surgery.

The government has NOT managed the postal service since 1970, when Nixon signed an act to make it an independent quasi-government quasi-private agency expected to operate like a business and make a profit. It gets a federal subsidy (96 million a year) but pays no federal taxes. It is supposed to have congressional oversight but refuses to provide congress with vital information about its costs and contracts. It has made a billion dollars a year profit for the past five years, while systematically cutting services and making such idiotic decisions that many workers suspect the aim of the Postal Board of Governors is to break the postal service so its business can be put entirely in private hands.

Back when stamps were 2 cents, the Post Office was run, subsidized and overseen by the government.

Nixon changed that when he signed the Postal Reorganization act in 1970, making postal service independent, a weird quasi-public quasi-private agency. It still receives some government subsidy ($96 million a year) and is supposed to have a degree of congressional oversight, but it has refused to provide congress with any actual information about the costs of its many changes or the non-competitive contracts it awards to former postal service executives.

The USPS is expected to operate as a business, at least breaking even each year. But it is a business that pays no federal taxes. It has in fact made a billion dollar a year profit for the past five years, while working conditions have become worse and worse, the service has been systematically cut back, and idiotic and complicated changes have led many employees to conclude that the actual aim of the Postal Board of Governors is to break the postal service so its services can put entirely in private hands.

I can hardly believe my eyes. “There are more than 400 operating reactors in the world... no responsible government will want to squander that investment”..... Squander that investment?? How about squandering the health of humans and other living species on this planet for unimaginable aeons to come?

You don’t believe me? Take a look at this photo essay on the children of Chernobyl 20 years after the disaster. Then tell me about responsible governments:

I do not defend Obama’s bill. As I previously wrote in my comment on this thread, the Canadian health plan was established in a bill that is 14 pages long, 7 of which is in French. It’s the effort to blow smoke and dance around the issue of corporate profit that has led to the 2,000 plus pages of Obama’s bill. In fact, like every other half- a**d reform of our health care system, it’s a bill that only makes things more complicated and delays the day when the country’s urgent health care needs are actually met. The insurance industry loves Obama’s bill. It keeps them in the game and keeps their coffers full.

I know nothing about New Zealand, nor do I have time to research it. I do know that privatization always is initially trumpeted as a great success and ends disastrously, if you think impoverishing the many for the benefit of the few is a bad result. If you have two economies with populations of 1002, the billion dollar economy where 2 people have all but $1,000 and a thousand people receive a dollar each would be judged a more successful economy than a HALF billion dollar economy where all 1002 people receive a half million dollars. I think this is a skewed way to measure success.

Most of the 30% of the money spent privately in Canada is spent on services like dental care and long term residential care that the government doesn’t pay for and that it didn’t before 2005. There has been a steady effort in Canada on the part of people who would profit greatly financially from a private system to privatize the system. My prediction is that in the end it will not be popularly successful.

As far as England and Ireland is concerned, the other shoe has yet to fall regarding the massive government cuts there. It’s not that government expenditures can’t and shouldn’t be cut. But what’s going on now is cutting the population down to the bone for the benefit of the few.

You might try reading two books to get a different perspective-- what could it hurt? One is “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” by John Perkins, and the other “Shock and Awe” by Naomi Klein.

About Ponzi schemes. The essence of Ponzi schemes is fraud: marks are promised that their money will be invested and will return a rich profit. In fact the money is never invested, and while the first in the queue might possibly make some money if the scheme goes on long enough before the inevitable collapse, whether or not they will be able to keep any profits from it is legally questionable and battled out in courts. National health insurance plans promise that a percentage of taxes will be put into a fund, the pay-off for which being coverage for medically necessary services. There is nothing fraudulent about it. It works in every industrialized country in the world, with better success (longer life expectancy and better infant and childhood survival rates) than we achieve in the US. The US is the only country in the world where people actually can be BANKRUPTED if there is a family health emergency, and where people are afraid to change jobs or start new enterprises lest they get sick.

I find it sad that you are cannot imagine the system holding together long enough for you to recoup what you put in! In this you have been taken in by another right-wing strategy, to pit the young against the old.

Health care is not a commodity but a vitally necessary service. The American approach to this reality is to use the same line that stick-up artists use: “Your money or your life.” Sick people are in no position to negotiate prices nor evaluate treatments. What they want is timely access to a doctor that they can trust, who they feel has their best interests at heart. It’s simply a distortion to call patients “consumers.”
There has been a fierce propaganda campaign against publicly funded health care for sixty years now. In the 50s and 60s, even physicians participated. Now most physicians in the US realize that they are not functioning primarily as healers, but as employees of HMOs and insurance companies, whose interests dictate patient care. The majority of American doctors now say that they would support a national health plan.
I do not hold the Canadian health care system up as a nirvana. But the political pendulum swings back and forth on public issues there as it does in any healthy democracy. Beginning in the mid-90s, Canada began to experiment with a gradual liberalization towards allowing more private practices and services. I don’t know what you mean when you say that private clinics are now booming-- only 30% of Canadian health care expenditures go to private sources, mostly for non-essential services and ones (like dentistry) that the system does not provide. Canada does extensive annual surveys questioning a large body of doctors, health care providers and workers and citizens about how satisfied they are and what they think needs to be improved in the system. Overwhelmingly in every survey, more than 80% of people questioned report they are confident that they will receive the treatment they need, and they would not trade their system for the US’s.

I do not have time to do an extensive research project here, but according to a Canadian National Population Health Survey in 1997, only 0.5% of Canadians traveled to the US for health care, and less than a quarter of these came here specifically for treatment. The US doesn’t have the same commitment to measuring and compiling statistics. But many Americans travel to Canada to buy drugs or obtain treatment. Sarah Palin, sworn enemy of entitlements like health care, admits that her family has crossed the border to receive health care in Canada. And, astoundingly, some American insurance companies are now offering to pay Americans to travel overseas-- to Thailand and Indonesia-- for medical treatment!
I cannot comment on your uncle’s difficulty in getting treatment for his broken hip, as I do not know details of his history or condition. While wait times for essential services are no longer in Canada than the US, there are some provinces where the waits are longer for certain procedures, notably hip and leg surgery, a fact which is admitted and which efforts are made to correct. But I personally know two people in their early 40s in the US who, in just the past few months, went to ERs with conditions that ought to have led to an overnight stay for observation, who were instead sent home and told to come back in the morning and who suffered horrendous consequences as a result-- one died of a kidney infection, and the other, whose headache was the result of a stroke, had a serious bleed that may leave her disabled. There are horror stories in any system. But the birds that fall in Canada are counted, and the voters and the government has some handle on correctng the conditions that cause them.
One last comment-- You point to the imminent financial collapse of European systems, ignoring the fact that the US itself is presently on life-support provided by other countries. We’re all in this together. The US economy is entirely distorted by high health care costs, the costs of prisons and war-waging, and a government funding system that tolerates and demands that our legislators sleep with lobbyists-- metaphorically and sometimes literally-- to get re-elected. Since the Citizens United decision, these lobbyists are not even necessarily American. In fact, Big Money has no national loyalties and doesn’t like strong national governments, because they interfere with the free flow of capital around the world.

Oh chicobravo you are so misinformed! EVERY other industrialized country in the world besides the US has a national health plan, and the care individuals get is as good as or better than what we get here. Only they do it at half the cost of the US, and EVERYONE is guaranteed the care they need.

As for your “ponsi scheme” remark-- that is just your standard Republican kicking-sand-in-the-eyes talking point. A ponzi scheme provides no actual services or benefits. National health insurance plans provide health care, peace of mind and the ability to change jobs, start businesses, and weather the inevitable downturns of the economic system without fear or despair. And it saves money on health care!

A little known fact-- check it out-- the US presently pumps more FEDERAL MONEY (our taxes) into our shaky health care system than Canada-- which covers everyone! This fact is hidden under a complicated money trail designed to disguise the fact that a huge amount of our health care dollar goes to provide huge profits for drug companies, stockholders, corporate CEOs, and batallions of accountants and insurance examiners and agents. A national health insurance fund could free up our federal tax money for other uses, like retraining all those accountants and examiners to do some of the tasks that are so urgently and vitally needed in this country.

You’re right, dtroutma, about the need for single payer. The current bill doesn’t bring us any closer to it. The Canadian health plan was established in a bill that is 14 pages long, 7 of which is in French. It’s the effort to blow smoke and dance around the issue of corporate profit that has led to the 2,000 plus pages of Obama’s bill. In fact, like every other half- a**d reform of our health care system, it’s a bill that only makes things more complicated and delays the day when the country’s urgent health care needs are actually met. The insurance industry loves Obama’s bill. It keeps them in the game and keeps their coffers full.

Single payer works in every industrialized country in the world-- works in terms of dollars saved, a longer life expectancy, higher numbers of children surviving into adulthood, and the psychological comfort of knowing that a health disaster will not also be a financial catastrophe. But there’s no sense in pointing this out to those whose ideas of debate is to jump up and down and stick out their tongues and shout: “Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah-- liberals can’t count!” As
Sydney Smith said, “Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It wasn’t reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.”

Here’s some ammunition for those who are working towards a genuinely healthy America:
Like all humans, scientists and legislators are fallible. It’s rarely possible to lay the cause of any disease to a single source. In an industrial society, a bad decision on a corporate or government level can adversely affect tens of thousands of people (such as the decisions to allow cigarette subsidies, advertising and promotions; to medicate children with drugs tested only on adults; to allow literally tends of thousands of chemicals whose health effects aren't tested into our air, water and food, etc, etc). Any industrial society with the right to call itself civilized must accept, along with the wealth that comes with industrialization, the responsibility to provide a comprehensive health care system for all its citizens.